I had a hard time with today’s post. I was talking earlier with Julie about her father, Dick, who just had a birthday. Recently, on Father’s Day, I’d come up with the bright idea to get Dick a custom razor and a subscription to Harry’s. They’re good razors, and I know the guy shaves religiously every day. It turns out he decided this gift was an insult, as if we were telling him he needed a shave. You know, because he shaves every day, and we see his face so often that we’d know if he needed a shave. I was taken aback. I’ve tried hard to find ways to get through to Dick because I hate to see Julie’s family falling apart in the absence of her mother, but it’s a losing battle. He’s not someone who wants to be saved or redeemed, and unlike the movies, redemption isn’t a one-way-street in the real world. He’d have to make an effort, and he just doesn’t want to do that.
So Julie and I have been discussing dads. Donald Trump would have liked my father. He was a bad hombre. My mother tells these romanticized stories of their love when they were young– before me– and I believe her, but I never knew that man. He was a very cruel person while I knew him, and he was always complaining about how life had done him wrong and he’d never manage to pay his bills or afford his lifestyle. He also considered his “day” with me his shopping day, so we often spent hours at Big Lots, a true delight for a young child. I was his little unwilling wing man most of the time, or the shoulder he cried on about the mistakes he’d made that were somehow not his fault because the world was out to get him.
I remember vividly the day he smacked me in the back of the head and told me that he wasn’t going to raise “a queer” because I asked for a purple My Little Pony (I wanted a steed for my Spider-Man to ride; turns out there weren’t Bronies back then, I guess). I remember another time that he used me to pick up a girl, then he locked me in his guest room for the night while they… did what dads and the foul mouthed girls from the cigarette shop do. On the plus side, he left me in his guest room with his crate of comics, so I spent the night absorbing his collection. His two favorites were Thor and Hulk. He was a big fan of the Defenders. At one point, he gave me his copy of Defenders #1. I can’t remember what I did with it, but that’s what happens when you give an 6 -year-old a valuable collectible so you can distract him while you mack on the girl from Arby’s.
I did say this was going to be a good memory of my father, though.
I’m getting there.
Regardless of all the problems I had with that man, regardless of all the pain, of all the yelling and all the ill feelings… there was one good thing.
Video games.
When I was young enough that he spent his once-a-week visitation time with me, my father was roughly the age I am now (a little older, I think– just over 40). He bought every new video game system, and he had them spread out around the console TV in his living room. We used to play; he always beat me, since they were his games and he had practice. But because he was an adult, and supposedly the male role model in my life (NOT), it never crossed my mind to think that video games were a kid thing, or that at some point adult ways meant no more Nintendo or Genesis. When we played he’d stop complaining about how dark his world was. Games seemed like his only joy (other than sex, but I wasn’t old enough to realize that was what he was doing, or that it was his propensity for having sex with random people that ended his marriage to my mother; I realized that later).
And now I’m a professor who teaches video game related classes.
So that was one good thing my father gave me. I never thought it was weird to play video games, or like I should ever outgrow them, and I always equated them with fun because that was literally the ONLY thing that my father and I had in common other than comic books (and he didn’t like the characters I liked, nor did I really like the characters he was into, though later I collected The Incredible Hulk because of Peter David and Todd McFarlane, and the movie universe Thor is pretty tight). I’d thank him for the fact that I always felt inspired to work with games and to treat games as a thing of reverence. You know, if I could.
i wish you well where you are, so far away from here, father. I’m sorry we never had a chance to be more than a passing part of each other’s lives. But thank you for what you did give me, and as weird as this will sound, I’m sure, thank you for not being there. Thanks for not making me watch you fall apart. And thanks for making mom happy, back before you broke her heart. I wish I’d known that version of you. Enjoy the quiet.